Bernie Sanders Made His Superdelegate Case to Bill Maher Last Night, But He Fell Short

Bernie Sanders is still chugging along ahead of the California primary on June 7, which is why he stopped by Real Time with Bill Maher last night. He made his case that he should still come out ahead of Hillary Clinton in the Democratic race—despite the fact that she has 271 more delegates and 2.4 million more popular votes. That case is still tied heavily to superdelegates, which he once condemned as undemocratic, and the pre-general election polling that shows him doing better than Clinton against Donald Trump.

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We've dealt with the hypocrisy of Sanders' superdelegate rhetoric before, but in fairness to the Vermont senator, he had a new angle here. "Four hundred or more superdelegates actually supported Hillary Clinton—came out publicly—before anybody else was in the race," he told Maher, "Before the first ballot was cast."

The point is a reasonable one: shouldn't they reassess their choice now that he is a viable candidate which polling indicates would defeat Donald Trump?

Except it still doesn't really deal with the fundamental issues at hand. Why should the superdelegates—unaccountable elites and party insiders—overturn the will of the people, many more of whom have voted for his opponent? And why are poll numbers from hypothetical general election match-ups the rationale for doing so?

More on that later. First, Sanders had a couple of good riffs. Regarding the new developments in the interminable Hillary Clinton email saga, he opted against wading into the intricacies of the new State Department Inspector General's report. Instead, he reminded Bill, and everyone else, that normal people have bigger—or at least more pressing—fish to fry.

"There is immense frustration on the part of the American people with the way we do politics in this country...The middle class is disappearing, we've got a lot of poverty, we don't have healthcare for all people. People want us to talk about their lives and their issues, and not just spend our whole lives attacking our opponents."

He pulled no punches when it came to the apricot demagogue who is the presumptive Republican nominee. Sanders challenged Trump to "change his mind a fifth time" when it came to their proposed debate, mocking him as a "big tough guy" who wouldn't step up. And then he really went in: "This guy is a pathological liar... That's just the damn truth. He would not only be an embarrassment, he'd be a real danger to this entire world if he were to become president."

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But eventually, they got back to the Sanders electability argument. "If he runs against you," Maher said, "The big word is going to be socialism." This points to "hypothetical" being the operative word in "hypothetical general election" polling. As a thoroughly detailed account in Slateindicates, Sanders simply has not been vetted as a viable general election candidate. The media has not dug into the fact that, according to Slate, he was a presidential elector for the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in 1980, for instance. The Republicans, as a whole, have barely attacked him at all—only Trump has lashed out with "Crazy Bernie."

Once you deal with the idea that Sanders wants to nix 2.4 million popular votes because of some poll numbers, you've got to face the question: Would he really, once the general election gears ground into motion and a sophisticated Republican opposition apparatus got going, be the strongest candidate against someone like Trump?